WP1: Various tests were designed and implemented, several case studies were evaluated and an anonymous online survey was conducted with the target population to assess the communication needs of younger – especially students – as well as older visually impaired and blind people according to the degree of their impairment. Additionally, a survey with visually impaired people was conducted to examine their use of text-to-speech systems.

WP2: Following the analysis of the existing guidelines for descriptive (Benecke 2014) and interpretative Audio Description (AD) (Fix 2005; Fryer 2016), and the analysis of existing AD scripts – currently almost exclusively available for feature films –, relevant linguistic findings were applied to the design of tests with the target groups. In particular, one test was conducted to investigate participants’ (n=12) perception of the effectiveness of Audio Introduction for the comprehension of an educational film. The test results suggest that Audio Introduction (AI) – by anticipating contents that are only visually represented in the film and cannot be gathered from the film soundtrack – clearly improves the comprehension of relevant and often crucial information. Additionally, ad-hoc AIs were produced for a series of documentaries, educational and information films.

As far as the software-aided production of AD is concerned, the user manuals of three commercial AD software applications, i.e. Starfish Advantage, SwiftAdept, MAGPie, were created.

Research outputs were presented in various workshops and lectures. An ever-growing demand for expertise in AD production at higher education level in Switzerland was clearly noticed, along with a need for accessible resources to integrate ADs into self-produced educational films. Such resources will be developed and tested in the course of the Project.

WP1: An online survey with hearing-impaired and deaf people was designed and conducted in German-speaking Switzerland (Jekat and Lintner 2018). Further data on the structures of information transfer in Live-Subtitling were also collected in French-speaking Switzerland and compared to Live-Subtitling in German-speaking Switzerland (cf. Scherrer and Lehner 2017).

Additionally, Live-Subtitling for sign language users with sign language as their first language (L1) was assessed via an online survey with the target group. Results suggest that:

a) professional sign language interpreters best provide access to and exchange of information with people who have no knowledge of sign language as they interpret in both directions (sign to spoken, spoken to sign).

b) reading live subtitles can be a barrier for the target group, since transcribed spoken language entails both a change of mode (from spoken to written) and, frequently, a change of language (from L1 sign language to L2 spoken language);

c) when Speech-to-Text Interpreting is provided via keyboard, sign language users would need additional speed writing skills during conversations (e.g. in a classroom setting) whenever they wish to ask or answer a question.

WP2: Sample studies on the production of live subtitles via either Speech-to-Text Systems (i.e. through Respeaking with FAB Subtitler Live) or via keyboard (with Text-on-Top) were carried out. The aim of these studies was, on the one hand, to assess which method is better suited for university teaching; on the other hand, to establish how existing software can support Live-Subtitling. Results revealed differences as well as similarities between the two methods. For instance, both methods can be applied remotely via video conferencing software. In this case, speakers in a classroom setting can be subtitled, provided they are connected to an appropriate microphone, i.e. spontaneous questions or comments would be missed by hearing impaired students.

WP1: The communication needs of younger and older people with temporary cognitive impairments were assessed through an online questionnaire. Six case studies were considered: temporary cognitive impairment a) due to multiple sclerosis, b) due to Crohn’s disease, c) due to stroke, d) latent cognitive impairment, e) very low knowledge of the local language. People without cognitive impairments were tested against their ability to focus attention on one specific visual or textual stimulus.

Furthermore, several corpus analyses were conducted to:

a) investigate information loss in the simplified versions of the party programmes of the German federal elections (Jekat, Germann, Lintner & Soland 2017; Krähenbühl 2018);

b) assess the application of Easy-to-Read guidelines in texts of a political nature (D’Agostino, Lintner & Soland 2016; Schüpbach 2017);

WP1: An online survey was developed in collaboration with the University of Geneva project team (cf. RA6 and RA7) to survey the target population and gain an overview of existing support services. Necessarily, survey questions had to be made available not only in all national languages (i.e. German, French and Italian), but also in all Swiss sign languages (i.e. German-Swiss sign language DSGS, Langue des signes Suisse Romande LSF-SR, Lingua dei Segni della Svizzera Italiana LIS-SI). The recording of the sign language videos included in the questionnaire (which was provided in three languages) was completed at the end of 2017 – taking longer than initially planned. The survey was online during a period of 60 days in February and March 2018 (see https://bfc.unige.ch/en/news/calls/survey-education/). First results were presented at the 2018 BFC conference in Geneva and will be reported in due time on this webpage.

WP2: The University of Geneva team (cf. RA6 and RA7) and the ZHAW team have been collaborating very closely on RA5, along with several partners outside the project. In particular, the project teams have pooled resources with programme directors and researchers of the University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education (HfH) in Zurich and the Swiss Federation of the Deaf (SGB-FFS). In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Daniela Nussbaumer (HfH), and under consultation of the SGB-FSS, a joint project proposal on the educational effectiveness of integrated schooling for deaf and hearing-impaired persons is planned to be submitted in 2019.

A Crowd funding scheme was developed in order to raise support and money on Science Booster for deepening qualitative interviews and is due to go online in November 2018. The preparation of the Science Booster campaign was supported with funding from ZHAW Research & Development.

Rodríguez Vázquez Silvia; Bouillon, Pierrette; Strasly, Irene; Hohenstein, Christiane; Zavgorodnia, Larysa; Näf, Manuela. 2018. “Roadblocks to Inclusive Education and Career Development for People with Hearing Impairments in French and Italian Speaking Switzerland.” Paper presented at the 2nd Swiss Conference on Barrier-free Communication: Accessibility in educational settings, University of Geneva, November 9-10, 2018. https://bfc.unige.ch/files/6615/4171/9554/RodriguezVazquez_et_al_BFC2018.pdf.

WP1:The aim of WP1 was to select a use case for speech-to-sign machine translation. Today, hospitals have to increasingly deal with patients who have no language in common with the staff. In a common project with the HUG (Geneva University Hospital), we developed a tool for translating medical dialogues which directly addresses the needs of the hospital: a tool that is reliable, secure and is easily portable to less resource languages (BabelDr, babeldr.unige.ch). BabelDr is like a translation memory (Gerlach et al. 2018), which guarantees reliability. The main feature is that doctors can speak freely and the system will map the recognition results to one of the core sentences of the translation memory (see Boujon et al. 2018). The aim of this RA is to add sign language (LSF-CH) as target language and see if a tool like this can improve accessibility and satisfaction in hospitals and to compare human videos with videos made with a virtual avatar.

WP2: The aim of WP2 is to define a methodology for translating to LSF-CH the core sentences of BabelDr with videos made by sign language interpreters and virtual avatars (JASigning, David and Bouillon, 2018, 2018b) and use it to produce two versions of the BabelDr system that can be compared in real settings. This work was described in Strasly et al. 2018 and Bouillon et al. 2018. A first version of the system to LSF-CH is already available online.

WP1: As indicated in the brief description of RA7, within this project we aim, among other things at improving the access of students with special needs to Swiss (i) universities’ web portals, (ii) higher education programs in general and (iii) translation technology modules in particular.

Access to higher education in Switzerland: A multilingual online survey was developed in collaboration with the ZHAW team (cf. RA5) targeting individuals with hearing and visual impairments, their families and professionals working with them. The main goal was to elicit data on the communication-related barriers that the aforementioned population groups are currently experiencing in Switzerland, from primary education to employment. The design of the survey was carried out during WP1.

Accessibility in translation technology modules: A computer-assisted translation tool review was conducted during WP1 to explore whether current translation technology meets accessibility requirements and can therefore be useful to translators using assistive technologies, such as screen readers or braille refreshable displays. A panorama of the state of the art was presented in Rodríguez Vázquez (2017), suggesting that current software used by translators is far from being fully accessible to visually-impaired translators.

WP2: During the WP2 period, work on the two aforementioned research topics was continued as follows: The implementation, data collection and analysis of the national survey took place between March and October 2018. A summary of the findings can be found in Rodríguez Vázquez et al. (2018) and Hohenstein et al. (2018). The results and the survey questions corpora (in 7 languages, including Swiss-German, Swiss-French and Italian Sign Languages) will be made available online in 2019 through the project’s website. Similarly, findings from a usability study featuring two popular web-based translation tools revealed that accessibility issues are still preventing blind professional translators from accessing the job market (Rodríguez Vázquez et al. 2017; 2018).

Accessibility of Swiss university websites: Taking as a baseline the findings from the Access for All Web Accessibility Study from 2016, the usability of two multilingual Swiss university websites was measured through a user-centered study involving 10 visually impaired users, seeking to observe the interaction of multilingual screen reader users with partially localised websites, and (ii) to assess the impact of the users’ language selection and the implementation of different localisation strategies on the overall usability of multilingual websites. A snapshot of the findings can be found in Casalegno and Rodríguez Vázquez (2018), while the full study methodological framework and results can be consulted in Casalegno (2018).

Rodríguez Vázquez Silvia; Bouillon, Pierrette; Strasly, Irene; Hohenstein, Christiane; Zavgorodnia, Larysa; Näf, Manuela. 2018. “Roadblocks to Inclusive Education and Career Development for People with Hearing Impairments in French and Italian Speaking Switzerland.” Paper presented at the 2nd Swiss Conference on Barrier-free Communication: Accessibility in educational settings, University of Geneva, November 9-10, 2018.

WP2: Preliminary research on Speech-to-Text (Dictation) Systems was carried out within the framework of RA3 (see above) – i.e. comparison between speaker-independent (Voice Pro) and speaker-dependent systems (Dragon); analysis of dictation systems’ weak points (speech recognition errors); development of recommendations. Furthermore, the quality of the live subtitles generated by Speech-to-Text Systems was assessed through several surveys with people with hearing impairments. The results show that:

a) people with hearing impairments may have difficulties in assessing the quality of live subtitles (e.g. some information was not understood or important information was not reproduced in the live subtitles). Nonetheless, live subtitles were rated as good;

b) in academic learning settings, it takes students with hearing impairments considerable effort to read live subtitles while simultaneously following relevant presentation slides or lecture scripts.

WP1: Research was carried out on the cognitive foundation of Community Interpreting, and in particular, on its central aspects of “role” and “responsibility” (Albl-Mikasa, 2019; 2018b).

WP2: The research focus was placed on the conceptualisation and implementation of four training courses in medical interpreting, as requested and sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Health. In addition, Bachelor’s and Master’s theses concentrated on the analysis of the corpus data resulting from the KTI Project “Anforderungs- und Rollenprofil für Dolmetschende im medizinischen Bereich” (“Interpreting in Medical Settings: Roles, Requirements and Responsibility”) (Albl-Mikasa/Hohenstein 2017). Another important development was the introduction of training courses for video-interpreters in Germany and Switzerland (Albl-Mikasa 2018a). In view of the significance of new technologies and remote interpreting, particularly in hospital settings, a pilot project organised by INTERPRET was implemented in the German part of Switzerland. Training courses were conducted in cooperation with the German professional association of interpreters and translators (BDÜ) and SAVD Video-Conference Interpreting in Austria. The results of the these initiatives were presented by Michaela Albl-Mikasa at the Conference for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation (NPIT4) in Stellenbosch and at the WITTA Conference in London.

WP1: The investigation carried out in RA4 (see above) allowed for an assessment of the communication needs of people with temporary cognitive impairments. Further work included the analysis of the working conditions for Community Interpreting into Plain Language. The results emphasise the potential danger of non-professional interpretation and translation into Plain Language. Further research will focus on the interpreting strategies of professional intralingual interpreters.

WP2: Preliminary work looked at the development of a set guidelines for spoken Plain Language. The initial results suggest that effective interpreting models and strategies, which are currently widely used in Live-Subtitling, provide no basis for the development of ad-hoc interpreting strategies for Community Interpreting into Plain Language (cf. Gassner 2017).